Facebook

Are the days of the free and open Internet numbered? The Internet is certainly used for all sorts of horrible things, but it has also allowed ordinary people to communicate on a mass scale that would have been unimaginable decades ago. In the old days, if you wanted to reach large audiences of people with your information you always had to go through corporate gatekeepers. But today, anyone with an Internet connection can literally broadcast whatever they want to say to the whole world. Personally, my wife and I have always been amazed at how many people we are able to touch all over the planet from our little home in the mountains. Over the past seven years our websites have been viewed more than 100 million times, and we receive emails about our work from people all over the globe. (Read More...)

Our world is changing at a blinding pace that is accelerating with each passing day. Thanks to the Internet, information travels at a speed that would have been unimaginable at other times in human history, and our technological capabilities are advancing at a rate that is exponentially increasing. What all of this means is that seismic cultural shifts that used to take decades can now be accomplished in a matter of months or even weeks. So will all of this change lead to a wonderfully positive future for humanity, or will it result in a dystopian nightmare? Only time will tell, but what everyone can agree on is that our world is rapidly becoming a much different place than the world that our parents and grandparents grew up in. The following are 20 amazing facts about what happens every single minute of every single day in our rapidly changing world… (Read More...)

The 2016 election will be remembered as perhaps the most contentious election in modern American history, and things often got extremely angry and bitter on a personal level. If you spend much time on Facebook or Twitter you know exactly what I am talking about. The vitriol on social media has been off the charts, and there are some people that are actually unfriending anyone that supported the candidate that they were against. This election has also torn apart families, friends and even entire churches. Relationships that took decades to build in some cases are now permanently shattered because of fighting over Trump and Clinton. (Read More...)

Have you ever come across someone on the Internet that you suspected was a paid government troll? Well, there is a very good chance that you were not imagining things. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government trolls are using “psychology-based influence techniques” on social media websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public discourse online. If we do not stand up and object to this kind of Orwellian behavior, it is only going to get worse and worse. (Read More...)

At the age of 65, Caitlyn Jenner has become far more famous than Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner ever was. She is the most high-profile American to ever identify as transgender, and right now she is getting a global tsunami of media attention – most of it extraordinarily positive. When Caitlyn’s Vanity Fair cover was released on Monday, it was front page news for almost every major news source in the western world. But it isn’t just the media that is fawning over her. Within just a few hours, Caitlyn Jenner received more than 100,000 likes on a brand new Facebook page that she set up for her new identity. On Twitter, the euphoria was even greater. Within fours hours and three minutes of setting up her new Twitter account, she had a million followers. That beat the official world record that had previously been held by Barack Obama. As I write this, she now has more than 2.2 million followers. So precisely why has Caitlyn Jenner become such an overnight sensation, and could it be possible that she is now the most popular woman in America? (Read More...)

We have all run into them. All over the Internet, there are horrible trolls that seem to delight in making life miserable for other people. But the worst trolls of all are the government trolls. And thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have some startling new evidence of what really goes on behind the scenes. According to newly revealed documents, British spy agency GCHQ is manipulating online discussions, infiltrating the computers of specific targets, purposely destroying reputations, altering the results of online polls, and using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for propaganda and espionage purposes. If people don’t start getting outraged about this now, the governments of the western world are going to see it as a green light to do even more. Eventually, it might get so bad that we won’t be able to trust much of anything that we see on the Internet. (Read More...)

Should it be legal for the U.S. government to spend billions of dollars on propaganda designed to change public opinion in the United States? Should it be legal for the U.S. government to use television, radio, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and Internet forums to conduct “psychological operations” targeted at the American public? An amendment that has been added to a new defense bill in Congress would make it legal to target propaganda and “psychological operations” directly at U.S. citizens. The latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act would overturn the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1987. Those two laws essentially make it illegal for propaganda that is used to influence public opinion overseas to be targeted at U.S. citizens back here at home. If those two laws are struck down, there will be essentially very few limits to what the U.S. government can do to shape our opinions. The government would be able to bombard us with propaganda messages on television, on the radio, in our newspapers and on the Internet and there would not even be a requirement that those messages be true. In fact, just as happens so often overseas, it would likely be inevitable that the government would purposely disseminate misinformation to the American public for the sake of “national security”. That is why it is imperative that this bill not become law. (Read More...)

The Internet is rapidly being transformed into a Big Brother control grid where privacy rights are being systematically strangled to death. The control freaks that run things have become absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that you do on the Internet. One thing that you can count on is that nothing you do on the Internet will ever be private again. In fact, if you are obsessed with privacy then the last place you want to be is on the Internet. Most Americans have absolutely no idea how far Internet surveillance has advanced in the past few years. At this point, it would be hard to imagine any place less private than the Internet. Do not ever put anything on the Internet that you would not want the authorities or your employer to hold you accountable for. Basically, the Internet is creating a permanent dossier on each one of us, and we contribute to this process by freely posting gigantic volumes of information about ourselves on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. The Internet is the greatest tool for mass communication that the world has perhaps ever seen, and it gives average citizens the ability to communicate with each other like never before, but there is also a downside to using the Internet. Everything that we do on the Internet is being watched, monitored and recorded and there is no longer any such thing as Internet privacy. If you think that you still have any privacy on the Internet, then you are either ignorant of what is going on or you are being delusional. (Read More...)

Why is there such a sudden obsession with monitoring what average Americans are saying on Facebook and Twitter? To be honest, the vast majority of what is being said on Facebook and Twitter is simply not worth reading even if you could understand it. But for the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Reserve, Facebook and Twitter represent a treasure trove of intelligence information. Tens of millions of us have compiled incredibly detailed dossiers on ourselves and have put them out there for the entire world to see. Since the information is public, the various alphabet agencies of the federal government see no problem with scooping up all of that information and using it for their own purposes. Many potential employers have also discovered that Facebook and Twitter can tell them an awful lot about potential employees. Social media creates a permanent record that reflects who you are and what you believe, and many Americans are finding out that all of this information can come back and haunt them in a big way. In the world in which we now live, privacy is becoming a thing of the past, and we all need to be mindful of the things that we are exposing to the public. (Read More...)